My only visit today was to one of our local parks with the puppy at lunchtime. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. The park, while within walking distance, is part of our regular route. I’ve been there a thousand times and felt sure I’d be hard pressed to journal anything interesting about it.

So I set myself a challenge — to find one beautiful thing while we were there. It started raining along the way and the park was dull and muddy. I worried I wouldn’t find anything beautiful.

Then I looked up. The sky, while mostly grey, showed the slightest hint of purple and the trees around me, while bare and spindly, took on another quality when viewed from directly below. The shapes made by their overlapping branches reminded me of cracks in the ice on a pond or a system of rivers and their tributaries photographed from far above. It was mesmerizing. I snapped a quick photo from beneath the trees on my phone before returning home — a little soggier than before, but also kind of ridiculously happy.

I printed the photo on some copy paper, cropped off a little snippet and added it to my journal entry for today.